The taste was coming to life, and after a while we were joined by some famous singers of our time, whose singing made the folk-songs known much more widely. Many of the songs I taught them were recorded and some of them have become so popular that they are still to be heard in every village of East Bengal. Different gramophone companies began to take up the recording of folk-songs as a commercial proposition. By about 1930 folk-songs had gained their public in the towns, and the radio began to take them up. Sometimes I was able to bring a party of singers to the town from a remote village and give the audience a taste of the authentic, original things.
(Jasim Uddin, Folk Songs of E, Bengal, USIS , 1959)
Poet Jasim Uddin and Abbasuddin advocated Folk songs of Bengal/India from 1930 - Calcutta
In 1922, Dr. Dinesh Chandra Sen of Dacca collected a small group of collaborators, and began gathering the ballads and folklore of East bengal. I was one of those who worked with him, helping to collect several volumes. Some of them were published with the english translations by the University of Calcutta; one volume was translated into French.
Dr. Sen was a true scholar with a genuine love for folk tradition, and he did more than any man before him to awaken in the educated public a sense of its beauty and value.....
I had been born and brought up in a village and brought up entirely by cultivators, and the folk-songs were in my very blood. To me, unlike Dr. Sen, the tunes meant even more than the words : they embodied the meaning of the traditional life I loved.
They enchanted me with their beauty and power, and I was set on making the reading public understand what was in them.
It was not only for the sake of the reading public, it was a question of preserving the life of the tradition itself; because the country people were visibly beginning to imitate the townsfolk, and liked what they liked. If the towns set the example of admiring the songs, the villagers would follow suit and take a pride in them; if the towns despised and neglected them the songs themselves would gradually die out of memory.
So far, however,scholar had worked on our folk-songs in a scientific spirit. About this time Dr. Backey came from the University of Oxford to research on them as a trained scholar. He got the tunes exactly recorded, and studied them in the light of his wider investigations.
But the awakening of interest was not an easy matter, and our first efforts were disheartening. I remember how I came to the town with my beautiful songs, and with the little money. I had I bought ten seers of the best sweets and approached the best singer. He ate my sweets, but he did not sing my songs. I met Mr. Gurusadoy Datta of East Bengal of the Indian Civil Service, who genuinely loved the folk tradition and put his money and enthusiasm into the work. Together we started the Rural Heritage Revival Society, of which he was President " and I was Secretary. We advertised in the papers offering scholarships from a fund supplied by him to students who would study folk-music under our guidance
By about 1930 folk-songs had gained their public in the towns, and the radio began to take them up
... Sometimes I would collect a group of songs and, knowing the taste of the towns, would select from them only those which were likely to be acceptable. I would expurgate the village versions, cutting out the lines which were too vulgar or too frankly erotie to pass in polite society. Sometimes I would learn a song in some cultivator's cottage, of which the melody impressed me but the words were clumsy and crude. So I myself would set new words to it better suited to educated taste. It might be that the villager who gave me the song knew only the tune and three or four lines of the words, and I would make up the rest in the same spirit. These half-original songs were often really valuable because the educated public liked them, and at the same time they suited the village singers and became popular.
The taste was coming to life, and after a while we were joined by some famous singers of our time, whose singing made the folk-songs known much more widely. Many of the songs I taught them were recorded and some of them have become so popular that they are still to be heard in every village of East Bengal. Different gramophone companies began to take up the recording of folk-songs as a commercial proposition. By about 1930 folk-songs had gained their public in the towns, and the radio began to take them up. Sometimes I was able to bring a party of singers to the town from a remote village and give the audience a taste of the authentic, original things.
Jasim Uddin (!959, USIS)
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